


Hard to be Human

by recrudescence



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-06
Updated: 2010-10-06
Packaged: 2017-10-12 11:28:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/124371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur steps inside and Dom gets a good long look at dark hooded eyes and a dark hooded sweatshirt, stretched and washed into nubby softness. University logo across his chest, hands shoved into pockets of pants too tight for that to seem possible. Either he's no longer in character or too exhausted to bother breaking it.</p><p>Inspired by a kink meme prompt: <em>Arthur in a hoodie and a pair of jeans is Cobb's favorite thing in the world.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Hard to be Human

  
They've had their moments. In point of fact, they've had many.

Arthur, sixteen, ripped t-shirts and dirty sneakers and scorn. Arthur, nineteen, sneers and spite and dogtags. Arthur, twenty-three, messy-haired behind the wheel because Dom can't trust himself to drive his wife to the hospital.

Arthur, twenty-nine, passing as a slovenly grad student in order to adhere to the individual they're targeting.

It's a cakewalk. The man is an academe, a professor of linguistics, and they've been hired by a friend of his who's trying to demonstrate that extraction is, in fact, more formidable than new-age claptrap. They've completed a dozen other jobs exactly like it, just to make a case for their work's existence and some shed light for skeptics.

The things they do these days are practically legitimate.

Afterward, Arthur says it was the easiest role he'd ever had. It's a new thing, staying low-key now that they're more or less back on the right side of the law, and staying close to home, since Dom has no intention of leaving again for a good long while.

Arthur has never fared well at tying himself to a place that offers him nothing in return. Civilian life doesn't suit him half as well as it suits Dom. While Arthur's been finding jobs, teaming with others, flitting through networks too fast to be tracked, Dom is content to fade into the woodwork as much as he can. Only Arthur's urging and a promise that the work would be too boring for words had convinced him to participate in the last venture.

When Arthur sends a text to ask if he's awake, Dom is almost surprised he's still in the state. When, fifteen minutes later, Arthur is at the door, Dom suspects he was on his way over already.

He's between jobs and it shows, sporting a few days' worth of facial hair and glassy gaze, along with a pair of jeans that look too constricting to actually be comfortable. Dom can't tell if they've legitimately been worn into raggedness or if Arthur bought them that way. He's never understood the logic behind paying good money for something that looks cheap, and it's something the two of them used to squabble over, years ago, before the industry became too heavy to allow for laughs.

Arthur steps inside and Dom gets a good long look at dark hooded eyes and a dark hooded sweatshirt, stretched and washed into nubby softness. University logo across his chest, hands shoved into pockets of pants too tight for that to seem possible. Either he's no longer in character or too exhausted to bother breaking it. No one suspects the stuck-up, shallow man Arthur usually plays when he's on the job, but this is a side of him that Dom doesn't see showcased very often.

He looks young. Dom swallows.

"You look sleepy," Dom tells him.

"Adults don't get _sleepy_ ," Arthur counters. His tone makes him sound a bit like Philippa.

Dom doesn't bother arguing. "If you want a drink, help yourself, but there's not much beyond milk or juice." He waits for a wry rejoinder about how wholesomely dull he's become.

But Arthur only takes a seat on the closest possible chair, which happens to have a stuffed dragon perched on its arm. Dom remembers picking it up in Ireland and having Miles send it home for him, along with whatever other guilt-racked purchases he'd made. "It's funny." Arthur seems to be addressing the dragon instead of him. "I never actually booked my flight, but I think I dreamed I did." And when he looks up, for the briefest of moments, his face is studiously blank.

Dom chooses his words carefully, but not so carefully that there's a pause of worrisome proportions. "Is there someplace you absolutely have to be anytime soon?"

There isn't anything unusual about this, and he tells himself so a thousand times while Arthur continues staring at the plush dragon as if he's waiting for it to solve all his problems for him. Dom has half a mind to pluck it out of his reach. Arthur will come and visit him sometimes, the same way he always has when he happens to be in the area, and this particular time just happens to be in the middle of the night. Lately, he's in the area more often than sheer chance should allow.

"That's not the goddamn point. If this happens again, if I mix things up without even noticing, I'm not very marketable, am I?"

"Not what I asked. Is there anywhere you have to be?"

When Arthur mutters a few obscenities under his breath, he sounds like a teenager trying out swear words for the first time. Dressed the way he is, he resembles a scruffy college kid slouching back in his dorm for a Bioshock marathon, and the combination should be at least a little bit funny, Dom's sure. Arthur had that phase, doing occasional beta testing for games before they hit the market—courtesy of a housemate getting into the technical animation field—but he seems to have outgrown it. Or perhaps only traded it in for something better. Video games are safer, but Dom's never played safe.

It's something that used to make him wary, letting himself rely on someone capable of appearing so young and untried. Dom was like that once, before he traded lab work for rogue work. Arthur's been with him through more cities than he can count, keeping the coffeepot and computers filled in every single one of them, and making sure that nothing breaks. Arthur, who comes into his home looking like he's sleepwalking and would resent Dom for judging him based on anything but his work. Marketability.

It isn't until he's paced across the carpet a few times that Arthur answers him. "Not yet. Still working on pulling something together. There's a startup trying to get me on their side, and they're swearing they've got a guy with top secret clearance, but it just reads like they're desperate. Professionals with real advantages don't just spew them to the first person who takes an interest."

He's gone a little stir-crazy now that Dom's life has slowed down. Dom has seen it happen before, the dreamscape turning participants into adrenaline junkies with nothing for a fix. He thought he was strong, with all the certainty he thought Mal was strong. There are supposed to be no regrets, since this work is important and exhilarating, but none of that nullifies the question of cost. It all has to tally up to some kind of price in the end. Dom has a hand on his shoulder before Arthur can start another circuit of the room. "You know the best thing you can do right now? Just rest. Let yourself sleep again. Really sleep."

Arthur put his youth on the line too early in life and he lives like he can't be rid of it fast enough, and Dom can't do a damn thing about it now since he was the one who cultivated that mindset in Arthur to begin with. "You need to take a step back before you can't take anything at all."

Arthur's gaze is almost pitying. "Have you been reading the advice column in _Seventeen_ again?"

Dom shepherds him toward the stairs. "Be nice and I'll even let you borrow it." He goes up without looking back to see if he's being followed, and when he does turn around there's the smallest hint of amusement on Arthur's face.

He's staring. Arthur catches him at it, poised at the foot of the bed. "Yeah, I look like shit, I know."

"No." Dom guides him down. "That's not it."

When Arthur kisses him, it's with all the finality and exultation they used to share at the end of a long run of successes. When Arthur sprawls in his bed, Dom goes sprawling with him, still fully clothed and on top of the covers and Arthur's mouth hot on his own. Feeling under that flannel-soft sweatshirt and cupping him through his jeans until Arthur moans, guttural and dazed.

And it's so simple, when one of those long legs presses over Dom's hip and Arthur's hips are thrusting with a sort of lazy intent. Just Dom sinking between his thighs, jeans riding down—because it turns out they aren't actually painted on after all—then briefs next, and taking him into his mouth until he has to interrupt Arthur in the midst of a spectacularly unbridled string of curses. "If the kids wake up, I'm eviscerating you." And Arthur doesn't laugh, but Dom thinks he comes close.

"Just one more thing you get to explain to them." His fingers are looped around folds of blanket, but he loosens one enough to drift down Dom's shoulder. "I'll let you know if I find someone who gives grants for therapy. Maybe we'd get a group discount."

"I liked you better when you were blaspheming." And Dom lowers his head again and that's the end of that.

Flat-slim stomach bared from beneath soft folds of sweatshirt material, Dom's nails scraping over the small point of a nipple, and Arthur humming dazedly. Hips rolling up, fluid and easy, and then Dom holding them in place so he can swallow him down completely while Arthur grits his teeth against a groan and gouges his hands into the duvet.

He looks good in his clothes, wearing another person's persona like his own, but even better squirming out of them, especially when he squirms right back against Dom and drifts into a half-asleep state again almost immediately. Trusting. Mal always said he had so much trouble trusting, and with Arthur in his bed, once their bed, Mal is never too far from Dom's mind. Mal could always say exactly what Arthur needed to hear and he tries to do right by her.

"You'll run yourself into the ground, you know," says Dom, maneuvering to get them under the sheets.

"Some things really aren't meant to last." Arthur's eyes are barely visible, glints through the darkness of his lashes. Bright and prideful and trying to grow up so fast, even now. He's exactly the way Dom made him and he can't take that back.

When Dom traces the roughness of Arthur's jawline with his lips, working up to his ear, it's because there's no way for Arthur to even pretend to ignore him. "Let the fire die down a little. Stay young for me."

A grimace twists Arthur's face and for a moment he's the way he was at seventeen, surly and scrawny and not having a thing to his name that wasn't torn or stained somehow. No one knows who he was then, no one but Dom anymore.

They never planned on this. Both of them used to thrive on strategies that worked to the letter, precise as mathematical formulas. Dom once believed that, though striving for perfection didn't mean attaining it, it did mean a decent chance of hitting somewhere close and learning from it. Arthur was always the one complaining afterward and swearing they were not taking risks like that again. Somehow, they balanced. It's occurred to Dom sometimes that balancing him out can't be an easy job. They're older now, and wise enough to realize that striving for perfection means nothing but plunging even farther. Burnout happens to the best of them

"Don't fail yourself." Dom says it into his hair, which is loose and unwashed and has the scent of clove cigarettes still clinging to it, and Arthur may not even hear it at all.

Arthur needs to run a little longer and there are some things Dom can't keep safe. Arthur trusted him and followed him when he went off the map, and Dom has to offer something in return, whatever he can, even if he isn't sure what that is.

Beside him, Arthur cracks a dry-lipped smile. So proud, always. "That's me, your friendly neighborhood failure. Cobb?"

"You're nothing like that. I think—"

"Dom." Arthur looks at him, old-eyed. "I'm tired."

Dom draws him in and lets him sleep.


End file.
